Data mining can be viewed as a result of the natural evolution of information technology. The database and data management industry evolved in the development of several critical functionalities: data collection and database creation, data management (including data storage and retrieval and database transaction processing), and advanced data analysis (involving data warehousing and data mining). The early development of data collection and database creation mechanisms served as a prerequisite for the later development of effective mechanisms for data storage and retrieval, as well as query and transaction processing. Nowadays numerous database systems offer query and transaction processing as common practice. Advanced data analysis has naturally become the next step.

The Data Mining Course of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign includes:

Cluster Analysis
Data Patterns
Data Visualization
Text Mining
Text Retrieval

And Data Mining Project (includes VM).